THE REIGN OF GOD

THE REIGN OF GOD

     The first words of Jesus are few and simple, very much like those of John, "The time is accomplished; the Kingdom of God is at hand; repent and believe the. Gospel." (Mark 1:15)

Bare words, incomprehensible to modern day people by their very so­briety. To understand them and to understand the difference between the message of John and the message of Jesus, they need to be translated into our language, filled again with their eternally living meaning.

"The time has come!" The time for which men have been waiting, which they have prophesied and announced. John said that a King would come ready to found the new Kingdom, the Kingdom of Heaven. The King has come and an­nounces that the doors of the Kingdom are open. He is the guide, the path, the hand, before being King in all the splendor of His celestial glory.

When Jesus says "The time is accomplished," he does not refer to the exact date, to the fact that it was the fif­teenth year of the reign of Tiberius. The time of Jesus is now and always is eternity. The moment of His appearance, the moment of His death, the moment of His return, the moment of His perfect triumph, has not yet arrived, not even yet! And yet, at every moment the time is accomplished, every hour is the fullness of time, on condition that the workers are ready. Every day is His; His era is not written down in numbers: there is no chronology in eternity. Every time a man tries to enter into the Kingdom, confirms the Kingdom by believing, enriches the Kingdom, consolidates, defends, pro­claims its perpetual sanctity and its perpetual rightness in op­position to all the inferior kingdoms (inferior because they are human, not divine, earthly not heavenly) then always the time is accomplished. This time is called the epoch of Jesus, the Christian era, and the New Covenant. At this point two thousand years divides us from that time; not quite two days, because for God, and for men of understanding, a thousand years are as a day. The time is ripe; even today we are in the full­ness of time. Jesus calls us even now. The second day has not yet expired, the foundations of the Kingdom are scarcely begun. We who live today, this year, in this century (and we shall not always be alive, and we shall perhaps not see the end of this year, and certainly we shall not see the end of this century), we, I say, the living, can take part in this Kingdom, enter into it, live in it, enjoy it. The Kingdom is not the worn-out fancy of a poor Jew of twenty centuries ago; it is not an archaism, a dead memory, a bygone frenzy. The Kingdom is of today, of tomorrow, of always; a reality of the future al­ways just-realized, alive, actual, ours; a work started a short time ago, a work to which everyone is free to put his hand to take it up, to carry it on. The word seems old, the message dim with antiquity repeated by the echoes of two thousand years, but the Kingdom—as a fact, true, accomplished—is new, young, born yesterday, still to grow, to flower, to pros­per. Jesus threw the seed into the earth, but the seed has scarcely germinated in two thousand years passed like a stormy winter, in the space of sixty-five human generations. Is it perhaps possible that our own time after the flood of blood is the divine and longed-for period?

What this Kingdom is, we shall learn page by page in the words of Jesus; but we must not imagine it as a new Paradise of Delight, as a wearisome Arcady of beatitude, as an immense choir singing Hosannas with their feet on the clouds and their heads among the stars.

Christ describes the Kingdom of God as opposed to the King­dom of Satan, as the antithesis of the Kingdom of Earth. The Kingdom of Satan is the Kingdom of evil, of deceit, of cruelty, of pride, the Kingdom of baseness. Therefore the Kingdom of God means the Kingdom of good, of sincerity, of love, of humil­ity, the Kingdom of the lofty.

The Kingdom of Earth is the Kingdom of matter and of flesh, the Kingdom of gold, hatred, avarice, sensuality, the Kingdom of all things loved by evil and distraught men. The Kingdom of Heaven is to be the opposite of this: the Kingdom of the spirit and of the soul, the Kingdom of renunciation and of purity; the Kingdom of all things valued by men who know the worthlessness of everything else in comparison. God is Father and Goodness; Heaven is above the earth, hence it is the spirit. Heaven is God's home. The spirit is the dominion of goodness. All that crawls on the earth, grubs in the earth, takes pleasure in matter—that is bestiality; all that lives with upraised eyes, desiring Heaven, wishing to live forever in Heaven—that is Holiness. Most men are beasts. It is Christ's will that these beasts become saints. This is the simple and ever-living meaning of the Kingdom of God, and the Kingdom of Heaven.

The Kingdom of God is of men and for men. The Kingdom of Heaven is in us. Begin at once: it is our work, for our happiness in this life on this earth. It depends on our will, on our response given or withheld. Become perfect and the Kingdom will extend even on earth. The Kingdom of God will be founded among men.

It is true that Jesus added "repent," but the old word has been distorted from its true and magnificent meaning. The word of Mark—epistrejw epistrepho ep-ee-stref'-o—should not be translated "re­pent"; epistrejw epistrepho ep-ee-stref'-o means rather the changing of the mind, the transformation of the soul. Metamorphosis is a change of form; "metanoew metanoeo met-an-o-eh'-o a changing of the spirit. It ought rather to be translated "conversion," that is, the renewing of the inner life of man. The idea of "repentance" is only an illustration of Christ's command.

As one of the conditions of the arrival of the Kingdom and at the same time as the very substance of the new order, Jesus demands complete conversion, a revolution of life and of the common values of life, a transmutation of feelings, of opinions, of intentions. This He called, speaking to Nicodemus, "the second birth." Little by little He was to explain in what way this total transformation of the ordinary human soul is to be effected. All His life was devoted to this teaching and to setting the example. But in the meantime, He contented Himself with adding one conclusion, "Believe in the Gospel."

By "Gospel" men nowadays mean usually the book where the quadruple story of Jesus is printed; but Jesus neither wrote books nor thought of volumes. By "Gospel" He meant, according to the plain and sweet meaning of the word, "good tidings." Jesus is a messenger (in Greek "angel") who brings good tidings: He brings the cheerful message that the sick will be cured, that the blind will see, the poor will be enriched with imperishable riches, that the sad will rejoice, that sinners will be pardoned, the unclean purified, that the imperfect can become perfect, that barbarians can become saints, and saints be­come above angels, like unto God.

If this Kingdom is to come, if everybody is to prepare him­self for its coming, we must believe in the message, believe that the Kingdom is possible and near. If there is no faith in this promise, no one will do what must be done to fulfill the promise. Only the certainty of the truth of this good tidings, only the conviction that the Kingdom is not the lie of an adventurer or the hallucination of an obsessed zealot; only the certainty of the sincerity and validity of the message can arouse men to put their hands to the great work of its foundation.

With those few words, obscure to the majority of men, Jesus began His teaching. The fullness of time, the need to begin at once! The coming of the Kingdom, victory of spirit over matter; of good over bad, of the saint over the beast. "metanoew metanoeo met-an-o-eh'-o "—the total transformation of the soul. The Gospel—the cheerful assurance that all this is true and eternally possible.

THE RETURN

THE RETURN

As soon as Jesus came again among men, He learned that the Tetrarch (second husband of Herodias) had imprisoned John in the fortress of Machaerus. The voice crying in the wilderness was stilled and pilgrims to the Jordan saw no more the long shadow of the wild Baptizer fall across the water.

He had done his work and was now to give way to a more powerful voice. John waited in the blackness of the prison until his bloody head was carried on a golden platter to the banquet—almost the last dish served to that evil woman, be­trayer of men.

Now Jesus understands that His day is at hand, and crossing Samaria He returns into Galilee to announce at once the coming of the Kingdom. He does not go to Jerusalem, the city of the great king, the capital. Jesus comes to destroy that Jerusalem of stone and arrogance, proud on its three hills, hard of heart like the stones. The men whom Jesus comes to combat are precisely those who glory in great cities, in the capitals, in the Jerusalem’s of the world.

At Jerusalem live the powerful of the world, the Romans, masters of the world and of Judea, with their soldiers in arms. Jerusalem is ruled by the representatives of the Caesars; of Tiberius, the drunken assassin, the perfidious heir of Augustus, the hypocritical pleasure-lover, and of Julius the adulterous spendthrift. At Jerusalem live the High Priests, the old cus­todians of the Temple, the Pharisees, Sadducees, Scribes, the Levites and their guards, the descendants of those who pur­sued and killed the prophets, the terrifiers of the Law, the bigots of the letter, the haughty depositories of arid fanaticism. At Jerusalem are the treasurers of God, the treasurers of Caesar, the guardians of the treasure, the lovers of wealth; the Publicans with their excise men and parasites, the rich with their servants and their concubines, the merchants with their crowded shops; money bags clinking with shekels in the warmth of the bosom above the heart. Sounds like some other cities in this world.

Jesus comes to combat all these. He comes to conquer the masters of the earth—the earth which belongs to all; to confound the masters of the word—the word which should be spoken freely wherever God wishes; to condemn the masters of gold, base, perishable and fatal elements. He comes to overthrow the kingdom of the soldiers of Rome who oppress bodies; the kingdom of the priests of the Temple who oppress souls; the kingdom of the gatherers of money who oppress the poor. He comes to save bodies, souls, the poor; He teaches liberty, in opposition to Rome; setting at naught the doctrines of the Temple, He teaches love; He teaches poverty against all the ideals of the rich.

He does not wish to begin His message in Jerusalem where His enemies, gathered together, are the strongest. He wishes to surround the city, take it from the outside, arrive there, later with a following behind Him, when already the Kingdom of Heaven has begun slowly to lay siege to it. The Conquest of Jerusalem will be the last test, the supreme trial, the great battle, the tremendous battle between the greater than the Prophets and Jerusalem, slayer of Prophets. If He should go to Jerusalem now (where He will enter presently as a king and whence He will be buried as a criminal) He would be taken prisoner at once and would not be able to sow His word on less ungrateful, less stony soil.

Jerusalem like all capitals of this world—great sewers to which flow the refuse, the outcasts, the rubbish of the nations—is inhabited by a mob of frivolous, elegant, idle, skeptical and indifferent people, by a ceremonious aristocratic class who have kept only the tradition of ritual and the sterile rancor of their decadence; by an aristocracy of property owners and speculators who be­long to the herd of Mammon, and by a rebellious, restless, ignorant crowd, controlled only by the superstition of the Temple and the fear of the foreigner's sword. Jerusalem was not fit soil for the sowing of Jesus.

A man from the provinces,—therefore healthy and solitary—He goes back to His province. He wishes to carry the tidings of good news to those who were to be the first to receive Him, to the poor and the humble because the tidings are especially for them, because they have long been waiting for them, and because more than any others, they will rejoice for Jesus’ coming into the world for the poor. Therefore leaving Jerusalem, He arrives in Galilee, enters into the synagogue and begins to teach.

THE ADVERSARY - THERE IS A DEVIL

THE ADVERSARY

  Our slavery to the flesh is branded on our lives by the daily need of our bodies for food, and Jesus wished to conquer our slavery to the flesh. Whenever He shared human lives, He consented to eat and drink, because His friends did, because it is right to give to the flesh that which belongs to the flesh, and finally as a visible protest against the hypocritical fasts of the Pharisees. The last act of His earthly mission was a supper, but the first after His baptism was a fast. Alone where His abstinence could not shame His simple-hearted companions, where it could not be confused with flamboyant piety, He for­got to eat.
  But after forty days He was hungry. Satan, tenacious and invisible, was waiting for this moment of material need, and seized on it. The Adversary spoke: "If thou be the Son of God command this stone that it be made bread." (Luke 4:3)
  The reproof was prompt: "It is written that man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word of God." (Luke 4:4)
  Satan did not admit a defeat, and from the top of a moun­tain showed Him all the kingdoms of the earth: "All this power will I give thee, and the glory of them: for that is delivered unto me; and to whomsoever I will I give it. If thou there­fore wilt adore me, all shall be thine."(Luke 4:6)
  And Jesus answered, "Get thee behind me, Satan: for it is written thou shalt worship the Lord thy God, and him only shalt thou serve." (Luke 4:8)
Then Satan took Him to Jerusalem and set Him on the pinnacle of the Temple, "If thou be the Son of God cast thyself down from hence." (Luke 4:9)
  But Jesus answered quickly: "It is written; thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God." (Luke 4:12)
  "And when the Devil had completed every temptation," Luke goes on, "he departed from him for a season." (Luke 4:13) We shall see his return and his last effort.
  This dialogue seems at first sight only a debating of Scriptural texts. Satan and Jesus do not use their own words, but compete by means of quotations from the Scriptures. We seem to be listening to a theological dispute; but as a matter of fact it is the first Parable of the Gospels acted out and not put into words.
  It is not surprising that Satan should have come with the absurd hope of causing Jesus to fall. It is not surprising that Jesus since He was a man should have undergone temptation. Satan only tempts the great and pure. To the others he does not need even to murmur a word of invitation.* They are already his, from their childhood on. He need give himself the trouble to win their allegiance, they are in his arms before he summons them.* And yet many of them do not know or would admit that he even exists. He never has presented himself to them because they obey him from a distance.* Thus, not having known him, they are ready to deny him. The devil's cohorts do not believe in the devil. It was said of old that the devil's shrewd­est scam was to spread abroad the rumor of his death. He takes all forms, so beautiful sometimes that no one recognizes him. The Greeks, for instance, marvels of intelligence and elegance, had no place for Satan in their mythology, because all their Gods, when closely examined, show the horns of Satan under their crowns of laurel and grape leaves. Satanical is tyrannical and lustful Jove, adulterous Venus, Apollo the archer, murderous Mars, drunken Dionysius. They were so astute, the gods of Greece, that they gave the people love-po­tions and distilled perfumes* to keep them from detecting the stench of the evil that consumes the world.
But if many do not know him and laugh at him as at a specter invented in church for the needs of regretful sinners, there are some who cry out upon those who know him but do not follow him. He seduced the innocence of the first two created humans, he enticed David the strong, corrupted Solomon the wise, accused Job the righteous before the throne of God. Satan tempts and always will tempt all the saints who hide them­selves in the desert, all those who love God. The more we go away from him the closer he is; the higher we are, the more he rages to bring us low; he can soil only that which is clean and he gives no care to the filth which spontaneously uproars under the hot breath of animalistic traits. To be tempted by Satan is a proof of purity, a sign of greatness, and shows a man that he is on the upward path. He who has known Satan and has seen him face to face, may well have hope for him­self. More than any other, Jesus merited this blessing. Satan challenged Him twice and tempted Him once. He asked Him to transform dead flesh into flesh that gives life and to cast Himself down from a height so that God by saving Him should proclaim Him as His true son. He offered Him the possession and the glory of earthly kingdoms on condition that instead of serving God Jesus should promise to serve the Demon. He asks material bread and a material miracle of Him and promises Him material power. Jesus does not take up the challenge and refuses what is offered.
  He is not the fleshly, temporal Messiah, desired by the Jewish crowd, the material Messiah such as the Tempter in his baseness imagines Him. He did not come to bring food to bodies but food to souls,—truth, that living food. When His brothers, far from home, lack bread enough for their hunger, He will break the few loaves which His disciples bring and all will have enough and they will fill baskets with the remnants. But except in cases of necessity He will not be the distributor of that bread which comes from the earth and returns to earth*. If He should change the stones of the street into bread, everyone would follow Him through love of his own body and would pretend to believe everything He said. Even the dogs would come to His banquet. But this He does not wish. Those who follow Him must believe in His word in spite of hunger, grief and poverty. Thus those who wish to follow Him must leave behind them fertile fields, they must leave behind them money which can be changed into bread. They must go with Him without knapsack or payment, with one garment, and live like the birds of the air, husking ears of grain in the fields, or begging alms at house doors. One can live without terrestrial bread: a fig left on the tree among the leaves, a fish drawn from the lake can take the place of bread. But no man can live without heavenly bread, if he wishes to escape eternal death, which is the portion of those who have never tasted it. Man does not live by bread alone,* but by love, fervor, and truth. Jesus is ready to transform the Kingdom of Earth into the Kingdom of Heaven, furious bestiality into happy sanctity, but He does not agree to transform stones into bread, matter into other matter.
  For similar reasons Jesus refused the other challenge. Men love the wonderful, the visibly wonderful, the wonder, the physical impossibility made possible before their eyes. They hunger and thirst after signs. They are ready to prostrate themselves before the wonder-worker even if he is an evil man or a charlatan. From Jesus they all asked for a Sign, meaning by that, a gigantic juggling feat; but He always refused.* He did not wish to persuade by means of the miraculous. He consented to cure the sick—especially those sick in spirit and sinners—but He often avoided the occasion even for these miracles, and He begged those cured not to speak the name of their healer. And He never used this power for His own safety, not even at Gethsemane when Satan tempted Him to put away the cup of death from His lips, nor when He was nailed to the cross and Satan repeated his challenge by the mouth of the Jews. "If thou art the Son of God, come down from the cross and save thyself." In the night of His vigil and in the high noon of His death, He resisted Satan and had recourse to no miracle to save Himself. Men must believe Him in spite of all contrary evidence, believe in His divinity even when confronted with what seems His common humanity. It is no fit deed for Jesus needlessly to throw Himself down from the Temple; to bring an end to the pain of another with the sole purpose of conquering men, and fascinating them with wonder and terror; to put God to a test, to force Him as it were, to accomplish a rash and superfluous miracle, only in order that Satan may not win the infamous wager founded on sarcasm and on arrogance. Loving, it is to human hearts He wishes to speak; uplifting in character, He wishes to bring sublimity into human lives; a pure spirit, He wishes to purify other spirits; deep-hearted, to light the flame of love in others; a great spirit, to bring greatness to little, mean, neglected souls. Instead of throwing Himself like a vulgar magician from the precipice which is below the Temple, He will go up from the Temple upon the Mount to give out from on high the beati­tudes of the Kingdom of Heaven.
  The offer of the Kingdoms of the Earth must have been horrible to Him, and still more the price that Satan asked. Satan has the right to offer what is his. The Kingdoms of the Earth are founded on force and maintained with deceit. They are Satan's own country, they are his Paradise regained. Satan sleeps every night on the pillows of the powerful. They pay material tribute to him, and give him daily offerings in thought and deed. But Jesus could have taken away their Kingdoms from the Kings without bending knee to the Ad­versary. He had only to offer men bread without work. If like a juggling charlatan He had opened a public theater of popular miracles, the multitude would have acclaimed Him. Had He wished to seem the Messiah for whom the Jews had been longing during their dreary slavery, He could have cor­rupted them with plenty and with marvels, He could have made of every land a country of grace and enchantment and He could have occupied at once every seat of the procurators of Satan.
  But Jesus does not wish to be the restorer of the fallen king­dom, the conqueror of hostile empire(s). Authority is of little importance to Him and glory still less. The Kingdom which He announces and prepares has nothing in common with the Kingdom(s) of the Earth. His Kingdom is destined rather to bring to naught the Kingdom(s) of the Earth. The Kingdom of Heaven is in us, united and singular. Any day when a soul has turned to righteous­ness the Kingdom of Heaven is enlarged because it has ac­quired a new citizen, snatched from the Kingdom of Earth. When everyone is good and righteous, when all love their brothers as fathers love their sons, when even enemies love one another (if there still are enemies), when no one thinks of amassing treasure, and instead of taking away from others, everyone gives bread to the hungry and clothing to those who are cold,—where on that day will be the Kingdom of the Earth? Where will be the need for soldiers when no one wishes to enlarge his own land by stealing that of his neighbor? What need will there be for Kings when everyone has his law in his conscience and when there are no armies to command nor judges to select? What need will there be for money and for tribute when everyone is sure of his living and satisfied with it, and there are no wages to be paid to soldiers and serv­ants? When everyone's soul is transformed, those so-called foundations of life which are named Society, Country and Jus­tice will vanish like the hallucinations of a long night. The word of Christ needs neither money nor armies. And if it really becomes the universal life of the conscience, everything that binds and blinds men, necessary unjust power, the criminal glory of battles, will fall like morning mists before sunlight and wind. The Kingdom of Heaven within is One and it will take the place of the Kingdom(s) of Earth, which are many. The liberated spirit will scarcely remember despotic flesh. Men will no longer be divided into Kings and subjects, masters and slaves, rich and poor, the arrogantly virtuous, the humble sinners, free and prisoners. The sun of God will shine on all, the citizens of the Kingdom will be one family of fathers and brothers and the gates of Paradise will be open again to the sons of Adam become as gods.
  Jesus conquered Satan in Himself and now came out of the desert to conquer him among men.

THE DESERT - ALONE WITH GOD

THE DESERT

 

  As soon as Jesus emerged from the water He went into the desert. From the multitude to solitude! Until then He had lived among the waters and the fields of Galilee and in the green meadows along the Jordan. Now He went up on the Rocky Mountains where no springs arise, where no seed sprouts, where the only living creatures are snakes. Until then He had lived among the working men of Nazareth, among John's penitents; now He goes up on the solitary mountains where no human face is seen, where no human voice is heard. The New Man puts the desert between Himself and humanity.
  The person who says, "Woe to the solitary!" only gives the measure of his own cowardice. Society is a sacrifice, merito­rious in proportion to its hardness. For those rich in soul, soli­tude is a prize and not a punishment, a period of sure value, a time when inner beauty is created, a reconciliation with the absent. Only in solitude do we live with our peers, with those solitary souls who think the great-hearted thoughts which con­sole us in the absence of other comforts.
  The people who cannot endure solitude are the mediocre and the mean. They have nothing to offer, they are afraid of them­selves, of their own emptiness. They are condemned to the eternal solitude of their own minds, a desolate inner desert where the poisonous plants of waste lands are the only things to grow. They are restless, unquiet, dejected when they can­not forget themselves in others, deafen themselves with the words of others. They delude themselves with the factitious life of others who are in their turn deluded by it. They cannot live without mingling, a passive atom, in the streams which overflow every morning from the sewers of the cities.
  Jesus lived among men and He was to return among men because He loved them. But in the years to come He often hid Himself, to be alone, far even from His disciples. To love men, you need from time to time to depart from them: far from them, we draw near to them. The small soul remembers only the evil they have done him. His night is restless with bitterness and his mouth poisoned with anger. The great soul remembers benefits alone, and thankful for a few good deeds, forgets the great evils he has endured. Even those which were not pardoned at the moment are blotted out from his heart, and having renewed his original love for his brothers, he goes back to men.
  For Jesus these forty days of solitude are the last of His preparation. For forty years the Jewish people (prophetic symbol of Christ) wandered in the desert before entering into the kingdom promised by God. For forty days Moses re­mained close to God to hear His laws; for forty days Elijah wandered in the desert fleeing the vengeance of the wicked queen.
  So also the time allotted to the new liberator before announc­ing the promised kingdom was forty days of close communion with God to receive the supreme inspiration. But even in the desert He was not to be entirely alone: about Him throughout the vigil will be animals and angels; beings inferior to man and beings superior; those who pull man down and those who lift him up; beings all matter, beings all spirit.
  Born along with the animal, man struggles to become higher than the angel. He is matter changing by slow transmutation into spirit. If the animal traits gets the upper hand, man descends below the level of the beasts because he puts the remnants of his intelligence at the service of the animal behavior: if the higher than angel desire conquers, man becomes the eventual judge of angels, and instead of being a mere soldier in the army of God, partakes of divinity itself. But the fallen angel condemned to wear the form of a beast is the astute and tena­cious enemy of all men who wish to climb that height from which he was cast down. Jesus is the enemy of the material world, of the animalistic life of the many. He was born into the world in order that beasts should become real men, and men be­come higher than the angels. He was born to change the world and to conquer it, to fight with the king of the world, that enemy of God and of men, the malign, the enticed, and the seducer. He was born to drive Satan from the earth as His father drove him from Heaven.
  Therefore at the end of the forty days, Satan came into the desert to tempt his enemy.

THE BAPTISM BY JOHN

THE BAPTISM

 

And yet Jesus came in the midst of a crowd of sinners to immerse Himself in the Jordan. The problem is not mys­terious for him who sees something beyond the most familiar meaning in the rite reinstituted by John. The case of Jesus is unique. The baptism of Jesus is like others superficially, but is justified in other ways. Baptism is not only a washing of the flesh as a symbol of the will to cleanse the soul, a remnant of the primitive analogy of water which washed away material stains and can wash away spiritual stains. This physical meta­phor is useful to the symbolism of the crowd, is a necessary ceremony for the carnal eye of the many who need a material help to believe in the immaterial. But it was not made for Jesus.

He went to John that the prophecy of the forerunner might be fulfilled. His kneeling down before the prophet of fire was a recognition of John's quality of true announcer, of his worth as a loyal ambassador who has done his duty who can say now that his work is finished. Jesus submitting Himself to this symbolical inauguration really invests John with the legitimate title of forerunner.

Jesus, about to begin a new epoch of His life, His true life, bore witness by His immersion in water to His willingness to die, but at the same time to His certainty that He would rise again. He did not go down to the Jordan to cleanse Himself, but to show that His second life was beginning and that He will not die, but only seem to die, just as He only seemed to be purified by the waters of the Jordan.

THE VIGIL

THE VIGIL

John called sinners to wash in the river before repenting. Jesus presented Himself to John to be baptized. Did He then acknowledge Himself a sinner?

The texts are explicit: the prophet preached the baptism of repentance in remission of sins. He who went to him acknowl­edged Himself a sinner; he who goes to wash, feels himself polluted.

The fact that we know nothing of the life of Jesus from His twelfth to His thirtieth year, exactly the years of fallible adolescence, of hot-blooded youth, has given rise to the idea that He was in that period, or at least held Himself to have been, a sinner like other men. The three remaining years of His life are the most brightly lit by the words of the four Gospels because in thinking of the dead, what we most vividly remember are their words and deeds during the last days of their lives. Nothing of what we know of those three years gives any indication of this supposed existence of sin in Christ's life between the innocence of its beginning and the glory of its ending.

There is not even the appearance of a conversion in Christ's life. His first words have the same accent as the last. The spring from which they run is clear from the first day; there is no muddy sediment of evil. He begins with frank absolute certainty, with the recognizable authority of purity. You can feel that He has left nothing confused back of Him. His voice is clean and clear, a melodious song not roughened by the sour lees of voluptuous pleasure, or by the hoarseness of re­pentance. The transparent serenity of His look, of His smile and of His thought is not the calm which comes after the clouds of the tempest, or the uncertain whiteness of the dawn which slowly conquers the malign shadow of the night: it is the clearness of Him who was born only once, and remained a youth even into His maturity: the freedom from obscurity, the transparency, the tranquility, the peace of a day which ends in night, but is not darkened until evening: eternal day, childhood intact and untarnished until death.

He goes about among the impure with the natural simplicity of the poor among sinners, with the natural strength of the sound man among the sick, with the natural boldness of health. On the other hand, the man who has been converted is always at the back of his mind a little troubled. A single drop of bit­terness, a light shadow of impurity, a fleeting suggestion of temptation is enough to drive him back into anguish. He always feels a doubt that he may not have rid himself wholly of the old Adam, that he may not have wholly destroyed but only stunned the other, who lived in his body. He has paid so much for his salvation, and it seems to him so precious but so frail, that he is always afraid of putting it into jeopardy or of losing it. He does not shun sinners, but he approaches them with an involuntary shudder, with a scarcely confessed fear of fresh infection, a dread lest the sight of the vileness where he also took delight will renew unbearably the recollection of his shame, will drive him to despair of his ultimate salvation. When a servant becomes a master he is never on familiar terms with his servants. When a poor man becomes rich he is not generous with the poor. A converted sinner is not al­ways a friend of sinners. That remnant of pride which sticks fast in the hearts even of saints mingles with his compassion. Why do sinners not do what he has done? The way is open to all, even to the wickedest, the most hardened: the prize is great, why do they remain down there, plunged in black Hell?

And when the converted sinner speaks to his brothers to con­vert them, he cannot refrain from dwelling on his own experi­ence, his fall, his liberation. It may be only that he wishes to be helpful, rather than to brag himself, but in any case he is always eager to point to himself as a living and present ex­ample of the sweetness of salvation.

The past can be renounced, but not destroyed. It reveals itself almost unconsciously in the very men who begin life with a second birth of repentance. In the story of Jesus no sign of a different way of life before conversion ever shows itself in any allusion or in any implicit meaning, is not recognizable in the smallest of His acts, in the most obscure of His words. His love for sinners has nothing of the feverish determination of the preaching penitent. It is a natural love, not a dutiful love. It is brotherly love without any implications of re­proach, spontaneous friendly fraternity needing to make no effort to overcome disgust. It is the attraction towards the impure of the pure who has no fear of being soiled and knows that He can cleanse—disinterested love—love felt by the saints in the supreme moments of their holiness—love beside which all other love seems vulgar—such love as no man saw before Jesus! Love which is rarely found again, and only in memory and in imitation of His love—love which will always be called Christian, and by any other name—never! Divine love—Christ's love! Love! Agape!

Jesus came among the sinners, but He was no sinner. He came to bathe in the water running before John, but He had no inner stain. The soul of Jesus was that of a child, so child­like as to outdo thinkers in wisdom and saints in sanctity.

He was no rigorous Puritan. He never felt the terror of the morally shipwrecked man barely saved from destruction. He was no over-scrupulous Pharisee. He knew what was sin and what was right and He did not lose the spirit in the laby­rinth of the letter. He knew life; He did not refuse life which though not a good in itself is a prerequisite condition of all good things. Eating and drinking are not wrong, nor looking at people, nor sending a friendly look to the thief lurking in the shade, nor to the woman who has colored her lips to hide the traces of unasked kisses.

THE FIRST ANNUNCIATION - JOHN THE BAPTIST

THE FIRST ANNUNCIATION

The desert sun burned John's body and his fiery longing for the Kingdom burned like a flame in his soul. He was the foreteller of fire. He saw in the Messiah, soon to appear, the master of flame. The New King will be a fierce farmer. Every tree which brings not forth good fruit is hewn down and cast into the fire. He will thoroughly purge His floor and gather His wheat into the harvest, but He will burn up the chaff with unquenchable fire. He will be a baptizer who will bap­tize with fire.

Rigid, wrathful, harsh, shaggy, quick to insult, impatient and impetuous, John was not gentle with those who came to him. He took no satisfaction in having drawn them to take this first step towards repentance. When Pharisees and Sadducees, notable men, learned in the Scriptures, esteemed by the crowd, of authority in the temple came to be baptized, he shamed them more than the others. "O generation of vipers, who hath warned you to flee from the wrath to come? Bring forth therefore fruits meet for repentance: And think not to say within yourselves, we have Abraham for our father: for I say unto you, that God is able of these stones to raise up children unto Abraham." (Luke 3:7-8)

You who lock yourselves up into houses of stone as vipers hide themselves under the rocks, you Pharisees and Sadducees, are harder than stone: your minds are petrified in the letter and the rites of the law: your selfish hearts are stony: to the hungry who ask bread of you, you give a stone, and you throw the stone at him who has sinned less than you. You Pharisees and Sadducees, you are haughty statues of stone which only fire can conquer, since water poured over you is quickly dried up. But God, who from a handful of earth made Adam, could make from stones from the shore, with rocks from the cliff, other men, other living beings, other sons for Himself. He could change granite into flesh and soul, while you have changed soul and flesh into granite. It is not enough therefore to bathe in the Jordan. That washing is holy and productive. Change your life, do the opposite of what you have done until now, if you do not wish to be burned up by Him, who will bap­tize by fire. "And the people asked him, saying, what shall we do then? He answereth and saith unto them, He that hath two coats, let him impart to him that hath none, and he that hath meat, let him do likewise." (Luke 3:10-11)

"Then came also publicans to be baptized and said unto him, Master, what shall we do? And he said unto them, Exact no more than that which is appointed you.” (Luke 3:12-13)

“And the soldiers likewise demanded of him, saying, and what shall we do? And he said unto them, do violence to no man, neither accuse any falsely; nor be content with your wages.” (Luke 3:14)

Compelling, almost superhuman when he announced the ter­rible separation of the good from the bad, John becomes com­monplace when he descends to particulars and falls, one might say, exactly into the Pharisees tradition. His only advice is to give alms, to give away the unnecessary. From the publicans he asks only strict justice: let them take what has been allotted and nothing more. To the fierce, thieving tribe of soldiers, he recommends only discretion! "Be satisfied with your pay and do not rob." This is nothing more or less than the Mosaic Law. Long before him, Amos and Isaiah had gone further.

Now is the time for the accuser of the Dead Sea to give way to the liberator of the Sea of Tiberias. The lot of precursors is hard: they know, but are not permitted to see; they arrive on the banks of the Jordan, but do not enjoy the Promised Land; they make plain the path for him who comes after them, but will pass beyond them. They prepare the throne and do not seat themselves on it. They are servants of the master whom often they do not meet face to face. Perhaps the fierce­ness of John is justified by this consciousness of being an am­bassador and nothing more. A consciousness which is never envious, but which leaves a tinge of sadness, even in his humil­ity. They came from Jerusalem to ask him who he was, "What then? Art thou Elias?"

"No. I am not."
"Art thou that Prophet?"
"And he answered, No."
"Art thou the Christ?"
"No. . . . He said, I am the voice of one crying in the wilderness. . . . He it is, who coming after me is pre­ferred before me, whose shoe's latchet I am not worthy to unloose." (John 1:21-27)

At Nazareth, in the meantime, an unknown working man was lacing up His shoes with His own hands to go out to the wilderness, resounding with the voice which three times had thundered, "No."